What We Are
by Phoebe Dynamite
Summary: She wakes up in his bed, with their unfinished story lying between them.  Epilogue/sequel to "Because You're Mine", one-shot.


**A/N: First of all, thank you all SO MUCH for the incredible feedback to _Because You're Mine_. I felt so accepted by this amazing, dedicated fandom every time I received an e-mail or read a review. It spurred me on enough to write this little piece, which I don't feel is absolutely necessary to add to the first story, but I couldn't help letting it out. I wanted to try my hand at writing a scene like this mostly because I've read so many awesome, imaginative scenes of similar nature. So hopefully this holds up.**

**I am unsure whether or not to leave this one-shot. I'd love to know your opinion on the matter.**

**Again, any feedback is tremendously appreciated! Thanks so much for reading!**

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><p><em>Why wait any longer for the world to begin?<em>

_You can have your cake and eat it too._

_Why wait any longer for the one you love_

_when he's standing in front of you?_

__- Bob Dylan

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><p>Richard Castle wakes up with the woman he loves most in the world curled up in his bed sheets.<p>

Before he even opens his eyes, he can hear her breathing. It is a faint, delicate sound, steady like a pulse, a reassurance of life. He hasn't dreamt of her dying in a while, but that sound, the one that means that they haven't gotten her yet, that she hasn't turn and run away from him completely, shifts like sunlight his perspective. He doesn't want to open his eyes. This might be unreal. She might be tucked safely uptown. She might be a hundred worlds away, deep in a case, deep in her hurt, and he's here, in his loft, trying to assess how much of their connection he has fabricated in his own mind. But then he feels something. A rubbing against his bicep, a feeling he recognizes. Soft, threadbare.

His old t-shirt.

She makes a noise, one he's never heard before from her. It throws instant life into his heart, like a dead engine surged with a jolt. He's a writer, should have the proper words to describe the sound that affects him so, but his mouth is dry. His brain is softer than the winter light that changes the darkness within his closed eyes. It is not a sound of discontent or disruption, merely something that has escaped unbidden. Like a pipe hissing. Or… or something better than that. Something that makes him feel like he's walking across a tightrope with a trembling glass in his slick palms.

He wants to open his eyes and see it. He wants the confirmation that he hasn't hallucinated this after a long, endless night of writing a scene in which Rook and Nikki get to do and say things that he and his muse refuse to do. That's happened before. But he pries one eye open, listening for some other sound to indicate that she is awake or has shifted away from him, but all is silent in the world. His bedroom is a veritable isle of serenity, being lapped by waves of Kate's Beckett calm, sleep-sedated breath. And he's still drowsy, feeling the wreckage of last night's shenanigans coagulating in his veins, so a thought escapes unbidden, a thought that whispers, _I can get used to this_.

He opens the other eye to see that the light filtering through the half-closed blinds is nothing more than a grayish glow. He cranes his neck a bit, ignoring the speeding pains moving across the tendons below the base of his skull, and catches the time before his head puts up an easy surrender and collapses back against his pillow. It's 5:54. He isn't sure what time they fell asleep, but he knows that it is _too early_ to be up.

She makes that noise again, but now it's a little softer, if that's even possible, and she burrows her face into his arm. He reflexively swallows back his breath as he feels the pressure of her nose and her upper lip impressing themselves into his skin. The tribal pounding of his heart detonates in his ears, but she is all sweet sleep melding into him, this warmth that has never been in his bed before. It's exactly how he imagined it, and it's too much. She doesn't mean this. When Kate Beckett allows herself to let go, intentionally or not, she beams so brightly, and only for him. Or at least that's how it feels to him. She slips up, forgets that she has that carefully constructed wall around her, and allows him to feel the caress of possibility, of a glorious reality that shines as strongly as the sun before it dims into darkness like a dying neon sign. She remembers and draws back in. That stunning "Always" echoes only until she breaks eye contact and sits back down to do paper work, an act that allows her to pretend that what's between them isn't something that people search for and dream about their whole lives, something they've mysteriously found in the most unlikely of places.

But last night comes back to him slowly, piece by piece, like wreckage washing up on the shore to tell a complete story. She didn't draw back last night, not at all. He succumbs to the thrumming in his temples and shuts his eyes slowly, telling himself that she was drunk. But then he feels, like the clouds opening up and heaven's gates appearing in the sky before him, her lips part ever-so slightly and her warm breath escape against his skin. It's so intimate, this part of her coming out of her innermost depths and touching him. He's kissed her, and while that singular event was amazing, this is making the room spin.

He suppresses a groan because he is having trouble keeping his lid on everything he is feeling. It's an exhausting process, really, but he has it almost down to a science. Beckett is his partner, his best friend, and when he's at the Precinct or at a crime scene or out doing anything crime-related, he manages to see her just through that filter. She's a savvy detective, the best in New York. He can focus enough to force the sun out of her eyes, block the laughter from her smile, ignore the music in the way she says his name. He can forget… he can forget how it finally felt to say the words out loud, four words that were only the first drops of rain in the hurricane that she had made of him and his ability to love. They said something, but they didn't say enough. Clearly, they hadn't been enough.

He keeps his eyes closed yet runs his clammy palm over his lids, breathing in the unpleasant whiff of alcohol coming from his pores. He tells himself to be a professional, to rally like he has been able to for the past four years, but he can't, because she's still breathing against him and he can feel her lips, those perfect lips, like the fruit in the Garden of Eden, something forbidden that he finally tasted but seemed to cost him everything –

_Fuck_. It hurts. Loving someone who is just as complicated as you are, yet gives where you take and stands down where you charge. It frays the ends of your nerves like shoddy wiring, causing your whole chest to flare up in a putrid combustion and numbs your extremities with uselessness. It burdens the tongue; it smarts at the eyes. It makes someone sleeping beside you like the answer to a prayer you never even uttered, yet it's the answer you feel floating down to your every need and question. This pain makes you imagine that when you said the words, "I love you, Kate," you thought you saw her eyes soften in understanding and her trembling lips fight against her broken body to smile, all before she slipped under the bullet's abyss.

He tells himself not to look down at her. All those times he's watched her with thorough absorption and genuine fascination as she filled out reports or interrogated suspects, but now, when she's sleeping against him in his bed, he won't look at her. He can't, because with all the repressed love in his system, he also feels the stirrings of failure. Richard Castle is not a man who dwells on the negative aspect of failure – not the man who accepts an absent father, moved on from two disastrous marriages, and framed his first rejection letter – but with this… _situation_, he can't help it. With Beckett, he's never quite been where he wants to really be. It started out with the challenge of trying to seduce someone who was clearly different from the rest, but once that passed away, he found himself coming up short in places where it really counted. _Don't dig up my past. Be on my team. Be there when I catch those sons-of-bitches_. And yet his disobedience clocked in overtime when he was holding the very fragile trust of someone who deserved the highest degree of fidelity. Some days he thinks that instead of tearing down her wall, he has mindlessly fortified it.

She shifts again, and this time it's her hand that finds him. He has to let out a pained little gasp as she rolls her body completely into him and her fingers blindly yet successfully find his labored chest. His thoughts mutter crazily into the echoing, empty corridors of his brain that he needs to _calm down_, this is still Kate Beckett, and she's just sleeping. He's woken up with her hand on his chest before. But then – but _then_ – her fingers clench as delicately as a butterfly flaps its wings against his abdomen, attaching themselves to his shirt and creating a little ripple of cotton in her clutch. Yes, she has the lips, and the breath, and the eyes that make him feel like he was right the whole time, there _is_ such a thing as magic in this utterly macabre world, but she also has those amazing, slender fingers that have held him during the best of times as well as the worst.

Richard Castle looks down at the one woman in the world that he doesn't just want but actually needs, needs in order to be a better man, a strong half in a resilient whole, and she's somehow the one woman who seems to vanish every time he really touches her. A living ghost who can never decide between death and life. His hand falls helplessly atop hers at the sight of untamed hair fanned across a flawless face, lips glistening with moisture, and the rhythmic rise and fall of a body that has lasted through the night.

Oh. Oh, Kate.

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><p><em>Everybody is gone.<em>

Her eyes flutter but don't open. They can sense a sort of dull light around her, but it does not seem as accepting and indulgent as the darkness that lingers. No, in the darkness she is alone. She can feel herself and only herself, feel the weight of everything she has been carrying around for years. She feels the chains she wears to sleep each night, only this time, their undeniable heft does not settle in disguise in her bones like they usually do. This time, this morning, they remain a presence on her body, and she feels like she can't breathe.

In the instant before her eyes rebel, she sees his crestfallen face in that hospital room. She hears herself tell him that she's tired, and it's not a convenient lie this time, because her entire raw body is radiating with hurt of every kind. She cannot possibly bear his hurt as well. She cannot share this, any of this, because sometimes she is barely strong enough for one. He's sitting there, looking at her, _loving_ her, dutifully at her bedside looking handsome and sort of cautious and shy, and she is suffocating. He has told her the thing that she deep down truly feared was all just her imagination, but she can't handle the reality of it, heaved in its very Castle-like delivery upon her. She can't breathe.

_Everybody is gone, Castle_.

She draws in breath that comes in with a shudder for its guest. She opens her eyes. The light is actually calmer and more forgiving than she expected, so soft and colorless, making the dark room look and feel like a hollow inside of a shadow. But she doesn't have time to wonder at the hour, because he's right there, looking at her. He isn't too close, but he's certainly not far, and he's watching her with slightly parted lips and those eyes that see and understand to an unsettling yet amazing degree. The most colorful things in the room. All for her. She breathes again, this time feeling it in her fingertips.

It takes a moment or two for her to realize that it is his breath she feels, her right hand cradled between his stomach and his palm.

She feels like she is lying on her back in the ocean. It's all the same sensations to her – rising up on the unseen wave and floating gently back down, eyes fixed on the seamless expanse of bright, cloudless blue above. She rides the current moving through his chest until she anticipates the rhythm and becomes almost part of it, a willing participant in the goings-on of nature. She takes as much comfort in the feel of his skin as she would the water that eagerly bears her aloft. She finds the peace the whole experience affords in the stability and beauty of the skies he keeps between his lashes. And her eyes are like the earth, ready to meet him, sustained by all he brings her, all he gives, expecting next to nothing in return.

They usually mirror each other in some way. Often it's hope or excitement or just pure, unadulterated understanding. But in this endless moment they mirror each other's pain. Neither smiles. They look at each other, waiting for some they both know will not come to pass just by sheer will, and they blink, and they breathe, and they wonder if this is it, if this is the most you could possibly love someone, because it sure as hell feels that way.

"God, Kate." The words escape his mouth and find her with a strangled desperation she can see so clearly in his eyes and feel worming through the chains holding her down.

And then she feels something fight back, something that burrows and tunnels through all the damage inside, and when it emerges victorious on the surface it dances wildly in the corner of her mouth. It shoots a signal flare to its partner across the way, giving it permission to do the same. And it does, with relish. She breathes so deeply and fully when she sees the genesis of Richard Castle's smile.

"You're here," she says.

Her voice is small, muted by shades of something a little childlike, but it is crackling with joy. A joy that's spreading deftly through her body, triumphantly waving keys. And the keys are his words and his smile and his touch and his body and his love, love like the sky and the earth creating the horizon. Sometimes there is darkness and sometimes the sky breaks open and sometimes the sea rages with pain, but they always find their way back to that perfect touch, that unexplainable but plain balance that nothing could ever permanently rupture.

"Always," he whispers.

A joy that frees her.

She lets her free hand roam from the pillow beneath which it is encased and travel up to his face. She lets her fingers comb him, and they send back happy reports of discovery to her anxious heart. The stubble is so good, minimal but existent, crawling over that strong jaw and firm cheek like moss on a rock. She lightly fingers his brow before dallying briefly along his hairline. Then she rakes through his bed-affected locks and murmurs a laugh as she does so, feeling alive and awake, especially when she sails through and finally meets her destination: the nape of his neck. She slowly cups the sturdy column of flesh with the intention of savoring it all. Beneath the exhilarated tip of her middle finger she feels the surge of his pulse, coming to greet her in a welcome that confirms for her that maybe all the others that she feels she needs are gone, but Richard Castle is right here.

Now they mirror each other's happiness. The blue of his eyes washes over her and she takes her bottom lip up in between her teeth, as giddy as a teenager but as confident as a woman. She doesn't need to seduce him, no; the sizzling simmer of teasing will come later, and repeatedly. But for now she just has to let him in.

"You didn't kiss me at midnight, Castle," she says without forfeiting her smile or withdrawing her gaze. Kate Beckett doesn't back down.

His fingers tighten around hers reflexively but with a startling amount of purpose. His smile… oh God, his smile softens yet gains something that sends all of her organs into quicksand. His free fingers brush the hair from her eyes, clearing the way for what is coming next.

They are both still beaming when he lowers his face a breath away from hers. This time she is not stunned by the intention, but ready, willing, excited. They lock fearless eyes – which, let's face it, started making love a long, long time ago – as his lips hover above every landmark of his descent: her nose, her parted mouth, her chin, the smooth slope of her neck, her chest. It's all calling out in a primal siren song, stronger than ever before, and his lips swell with desire. She's restraining a panting that he can see and hear and feel possess her chest; it's almost like she's responding in kind to the need physically solidifying in his own body. He looks up the length of her form that he has trailed down without making contact and beholds a sultry yet smiling mouth. And those eyes. He is nearly crippled by the dark, consuming desire he divines in Kate Beckett's eyes for the first time.

She is dying to whisper, "Touch me," but the request – the plea – is blown away like desert sand swirling aimlessly around her arid mouth when his hands reverently grasp her hipbones. She produces a sound that plays with the fine line between a gasp and a delighted laugh as his thumbs graze her jutting pelvis. He is taking his time, exploring a previously forbidden terrain that is now open to him. He wants to build this fire slowly but perfectly.

His hands traverse the smooth landscape of her bare stomach, and it takes all she has not to shudder. She wants to have nothing impeding them anymore, but she is enjoying how he is slowly unwrapping her, like a gift he has been patiently awaiting. And the way his touch is searing her…. _God_, she knew that they would be good together, but he is hardly doing anything and already she wants to come undone for him. She wants to make him do the same, but she'll wait her turn to work her own brand of magic. She doesn't mind in the slightest.

All goes too perfectly, and both are so caught up in the sweet beginning of this release that neither is in the right mindset to anticipate what comes next. His traipsing digits encounter the puckered skin of her scar, like an unsuspecting hiker coming over a ridge. He does not retract, but he does stop, his uninhibited facial muscles relaxing as he listens to her unmistakable intake of breath. The damaged line of flesh radiates beneath his touch while he looks into her eyes, waiting, not looking for permission to continue but a sign that she understands.

She has to understand that he loves her, she _has_ to. And her scars, both the ones able to be seen and otherwise, all make her the woman that he wants in his bed every night for the rest of his life. He can feel his bottom lip trembling, torn between the compulsive need to say something and the innate pull to just go to her in a kiss that will mend everything between them. He tries to read her face, but remarkably, she is quite vague. Not closed off, but unreadable. Her desire has been dimmed but not extinguished by something that he doesn't quite know how to interpret. And that makes him nervous.

He starts to pull away, instantly hating himself for this, another failure. The scar itself was reminder enough; to him, it did nothing to mar Kate Beckett's immutable beauty, but it did brand his brain with the image of himself getting to her too late, when she was already bleeding in the cemetery grass. As he prepares to draw back and apologize he suppresses a grimace that feels as unnatural to his face as a raincloud on a spotless summer day.

But then she, the amazing Katherine Beckett, cocks that fine brow at him and grins like the whole world is a plan of her devising. She comes no physically closer to him, but damn it if it doesn't feel that way when she calls almost tauntingly to him from the deep valley of his pillow.

"We could always just cuddle, Castle."

He is shocked, flatlined by a very potent mixture of relief, amusement, and happiness. Just when he thought there was no way he could possibly love her more.

She is not aware that she's doing it, but she gives him a look that could not be purer Kate Beckett. He can't even really describe it accurately – could never, no matter how long he shadows her, no matter how many books he writes – but he knows that it means that that wall, at least for this moment, tangled up together in his bed sheets at dawn on New Year's Day, is a dilapidated ruin. She is the woman who was made from the obstacles in her past but no longer drags them around with her. She is the woman who has scars that don't bother her.

She had worried about the first time Castle would see her scars. And even now, with him melting her with that look she didn't know existed outside of novels and movies, she feels a mild fluttering of doubt in her racing heart. But she refuses to retreat, especially after all of this. So she sticks her courage to the sticking place and drags her hands along her midriff. She watches his eyes fixedly as his gaze follows her purposeful reveal. She feels the slightly chilled air hit her first scar, the one from the operation that Castle has found, and then waits for the exposure of the second one. The survivor's scar. The one she has been trying tirelessly to make a strength.

A sliver of her breasts is exposed in the gentle pull to the remains of the bullet hole. It is sensual and something so much more all at one time, and it seizes his entire body at once. To actually look at it, this thing that almost took her from him… it stills his breath and gives him the sensation of a lungful of water. He stares at it, not dwelling on failure, but on _her_, her will to live, and the words he gave her that are sealed inside of her somewhere in there. They _have_ to be; they were the words that walked with her into the darkness, the wings that guided the light out of her eyes. He shuts his eyes, coming to terms with it as best as he can for the moment, and then leans down.

He decides not to look back up at her first, at her face battling back visible anticipation. But that all thaws when his lips press with a thousand different meanings into the rough skin between her breasts. His breath kindles her skin; his lips send a flush across her body and a sigh from her lips. His hands clench with tenderness at her waist, and her whole form begins to arch up in response. Her hands go automatically to his hair, under the command of how he breathes against her like no man has ever done or will ever do again.

Because Richard Castle has brought acceptance and love to the very place where she is incomplete.

He kissed her scar first.

She slowly moves her arms up away from him and holds his eyes as she raises them above her head. They stare at each, heavy with understanding, swathed in the thick of passion that has less to do with heat and more to do with the great depth of their intimacy. Again, no words are necessary, but she is ready to speak them if need be. But he needs no encouragement. With an impressive amount of precision and care, he takes the edges of her shirt and pulls it up, taking to the trail she has already blazed for him. Their gazes do not waver; he only looks down at what has been revealed of her after the shirt has been done away with, and my God, she is even more beautiful than he ever imagined. He's horribly pissed at himself for thinking instantly of that Katy Perry song, but he can't help it – she _is_ from a whole other world, with her skin faintly iridescent, like a pearl, under the muted light of a new day fighting its way into the room. He's seen so many beautiful women who have set him instantly on fire, but looking at her now makes him feel something completely alien. He goes to her eyes and sees, laid out like gifts, so many emotions: confidence, tenderness, eagerness, calmness. He sees no hesitation or vulnerability, even though he has always asserted and taught his daughter as much that what makes sex something of value is the extreme degree of vulnerability it requires and is exchanged not with passion but trust. Has he always practiced what he preaches? No; but that could not matter less in this moment, because in this moment he is with Kate Beckett, who made his heart vulnerable in a non-paternal way for the first time in so long, whom he trusts like he trusts nothing of this world that threw them together so fatefully. Kate Beckett, who is alive and who is saying without the use of words, his oldest companions, _I have waited as long as you have for this._

He wants to tell her she's so beautiful, the most beautiful thing he's ever seen, but he can feel the rumblings in his vocal chords are rougher than he anticipated, swollen with emotion. He tries again, but he catches himself as the words perch on his tongue that is longing to taste her… and they are _not_ a declaration of her beauty but a declaration of love. His body is aching to let her know how much he loves her, with words, with his own body, not just with looks and gestures and secret phone calls and a daily cup of coffee. He doesn't just want to say always, but show her, give it to her in a way that cannot be forgotten, come hell or high water or a haze of sniper bullets.

She takes her lip into her teeth, and he can't tell if she does it consciously or not, but it couldn't matter less because he is audibly breathless at the gesture. The flicker of her smile appears before him at his reaction, and it makes him smile in turn.

This time she's not dying. She's not beneath him because she has been taken down. She is looking up at him of her own choice, her own desire, and she will not slip away from him this time. And he knows this well enough to refrain from telling her what he told her genuinely yet desperately that day when so much and yet nothing was different. He has been given the opportunity he has waited for since… since… aw hell, he can barely think past knowing her. She is a part of him, and he is a part of her. He looks deep into her eyes and smiles even wider; his gaze says _partner_ and her gaze says _always_.

So very slowly but quite expertly, Richard Castle snakes his hands along the silhouette of Kate Beckett's body, skimming both skin and sheet, and only halts when he arrives at her own hands. His palms find hers immediately; their fingers collapse in ten simultaneous embraces. He exerts some pressure, pushing their joined hands deeper into the gracious mattress, resulting in Kate unleashing a smile as if she let it escape from Pandora's box – this thing that changes Castle's entire world.

He leans down hungrily, but she meets him halfway, both of them making the final move that has them instantly senseless. It is a perfect mesh of lips yearning for each other's softness and strength. There is constant, effortless anticipation; when his tongue slides towards her lips, she parts them before he gets there, like gates already opened for a weary traveler to come seek the warm shelter within. When she sweeps her own tongue against his teeth, he bites down on the tip of it with the exact right amount of zeal, the amount that fills her throat with a noise that tangos between exhilaration and satisfaction. He is spurred on by her every move, from the way her hips roll instinctively against his, to the insistence he feels in her clutch, to the joyous laugh that lives in her mouth, never able to escape because his assault, a laugh that seems to say _finally_.

They are all sweatpants and bare skin and morning breath. They are moans of approvals and sighs of pleasure. They are the smell of cherries and the stomach churns of a dying hangover and bitten lips and pulses that gyrate to the music that is this, the two of them allowing this, the two of them releasing. The two of them sharing one breath, just a sweet microcosm of their larger fate – to share one life.

She pries her hands away from his and they fly to his sides. The filmy material of his shirt allows her to mold her fingers to his ribs, like a potter pressing new life into clay. His own hands at first don't know what to do with their newfound freedom, but go blindly on instinct to her face. He cradles her neck and jaw, fingers delighting in their motion against her cheeks, while his lips kiss eagerly through a smile. Then he feels her tugging at his shirt and the air hitting the skin of his back. He leans back a little so that it will come off easier, but she follows him, refusing to break contact. Just before the bunched material reaches the point where he has to move his arms to get it off, she mumbles something against his mouth… something that sounds like _oh_ or _God_ or maybe just a moan, but something that is distinctly followed by _Rick_.

His body parts know just what to do then. The shirt is off completely in a second and then his mouth is on fire against hers, dragging her up, sucking the oxygen from her lungs. His hands slip under the defenseless barrier of elastic and cotton that hugs her waist. There is no resistance against the downward pull that he forces himself to execute with patience and a hint of teasing. He could rip the rest of the clothes right off of her, but he wants there to be some evidence of the pace at which they have arrived at what to him was always a foregone conclusion. As his digits come to behold the hot skin of her thighs and absorb her slight trembling like a building does the shockwaves of a quake, he hears her breathless delight against and inside of his lips. This is it. Her fingers gallivant freely through his hair as so many words zipline through his brain that is otherwise blank from pure sensory overload, words like _Kate_ and _love_ and _tbank you_ and _don't stop ever_ and _marry me_.

It's a good thing she has that mouth of his quite occupied.

An abrupt sound against his bedside table startles them both and they gasp into each other's mouths, their hearts flipping against each other's bare chests. It sounds like a swarm of enraged wasps, but it takes a few moments of returning sense and applied sight to understand that it is his phone vibrating. They both stare at it with ragged breath, as unsure of what to do as if they have come against something dropped by a UFO. Without thinking, Castle says, "I sincerely hope it's not a body."

Kate collapses against the pillow, chest heaving, palm going to her forehead. "It can't be a body," she murmurs. "It's your phone. And I'm not calling you, I'm _here_."

At this Castle all but forgets about the buzzing phone and just looks at her. He smiles, the gesture crinkling the corners of his eyes, and he says, "Yes you are."

She wants to roll her eyes, she really does, but it is not possible. Not with the way he is looking at her and the way her entire body feels like a pool of water settling down after being thrashed with disturbance (_welcome_ disturbance). And so she just sighs and commits to memory how natural this feels, like they have been together for a long time and have been interrupted by silly little life hiccups countless times before. It is a realization that surprises her but definitely softens the abrasive feeling of discontent at being deprived of gratification. His smile and those unbelievably blue orbs God gave him for eyes – and all the love gleaming there – do their part as well.

He leans in and kisses her, and while it is more chaste than those of the previous experience, it is a bit dazzling in its perfection. It is something that Kate would call in high school "the perfect kiss" – duration, openness, heat, the butterfly effect in her stomach, all of it. It's all there, in his kiss.

"You're extraordinary," he whispers against her. Her heart clenches at the happiness in his voice, sounding like the vocal equivalent of the way her bloodstream is singing.

"You're not so bad yourself, Castle."

Unbeknownst to them, the phone has stopped vibrating but starts up again. At the harsh sound, Castle huffs, shuts his eyes, and lets his head fall to Beckett's chest. Laughing, she gives him a moment of rest there before she threads her fingers through his hair and pulls him up. "Pick it up," she says with a grin, a breath away from his face.

He grins wickedly right back at her but leans out to the side and grabs up his phone. When he looks down at the name lit up on the screen, his face falls and he groans. Muttering under his breath about how he can't believe this (even though he can), he pushes the answer button and brings the phone to his ear.

"What, Mother?"

Kate has to turn her face into the pillow to stifle peal after peal of laughter. The motion is shaking the bed, and Castle has to pretend that the feel of her half-naked body quivering violently underneath him isn't as arousing as it _most definitely_ is as his mother explains that she either forgot to take her keys last night or lost them somewhere in transit throughout the evening. In any case, she is standing outside of the loft, in desperate need of a bed and a Bloody Mary (Martha has always been a big believer in the old 'hair of the dog' philosophy). He hangs up, his eyes shut like he thinks that if he just stays like that, ignoring this occurrence, his mother will vanish and they can seamlessly resume their activities. But when he opens his eyes, Kate, almost fully recovered from laughing, is smiling sweetly up at him. There is no regret there. Which, to Richard Castle, eternal optimist, means that they will have another chance, maybe in a minute, maybe in an hour, maybe in a day, after he asks her out on a proper date. Regardless, this is not something that will sink under the waves and never be spoken of again. With happy mouths and daring hands, they have just written another chapter of their story.

He is man who loves stories, who is always there, anywhere, for the story, and this one – their story – is the one he never wants to reach the ending of.

"Happy New Year, Beckett."

She makes a humming sound through the compressed line of her lips, her eyes still beaming like young stars as she reaches out to run her thumb across his lips. He suddenly can't shake the image of her mouth slick with butter and syrup from the pancakes he is going to make her. Watching her lick them away while flashing him a knowing gaze will be more than enough of a response to his meager, edible thank you.

"Happy New Year, Castle."


End file.
